End of Sale Notice:
Commercial support for NGINX Service Mesh is available to customers who currently have active NGINX Microservices Bundle subscriptions. F5 NGINX announced the End of Sale (EoS) for the NGINX Microservices Bundles as of July 1, 2023.
See our End of Sale announcement for more details.
SMI Traffic Metrics
How to set up and view SMI traffic metrics
Overview
Traffic Metrics are a mechanism through which you can view important information about your running workloads. Exposed by the SMI spec, this allows you to migrate functionality from your existing service mesh. The NGINX Service Mesh creates an extension API Server and shim that queries Prometheus and returns the results in a traffic metrics format. You can access these metrics through a variety of methods ranging from the nginx-meshctl tool to querying the Kubernetes API manually.
Traffic Metrics depends on Prometheus to get the critical service information needed to visualize your applications.
Note:
To configure NGINX Service Mesh to export metrics to your Prometheus deployment, refer to the Monitoring and Tracing guide for instructions.
If you are deploying NGINX Plus Ingress Controller with the NGINX Service Mesh, make sure to configure the NGINX Plus Ingress Controller to export metrics. Refer to the Metrics section of the NGINX Plus Ingress Controller Deployment tutorial for instructions.
How to View Traffic Metrics
There are multiple ways you can view the traffic metrics generated by NGINX Service Mesh.
Note:
Occasionally metrics are reset when the nginx-mesh-sidecar reloads NGINX Plus. If traffic is flowing and you fail to see metrics, retry after 30 seconds.
nginx-meshctl top
The nginx-meshctl top command uses traffic metrics to give information at a glance of traffic currently flowing through the mesh. An example output looks like this:
$ nginx-meshctl top
Deployment Incoming Success Outgoing Success NumRequests
productpage-v1 100.00% 100.00% 221
reviews-v2 100.00% 100.00% 112
reviews-v3 100.00% 100.00% 110
reviews-v1 100.00% 54
details-v1 100.00% 165
ratings-v1 100.00% 54
You can also view additional golden metrics and edge information by specifying a specific resource in the top command. An example of this is:
$ nginx-meshctl top deployments/productpage-v1
Deployment Direction Resource Success Rate P99 P90 P50 NumRequests
productpage-v1
To reviews-v2 100.00% 91ms 22ms 15ms 54
To details-v1 100.00% 15ms 4ms 2ms 160
To reviews-v1 100.00% 91ms 16ms 5ms 54
To reviews-v3 100.00% 183ms 20ms 14ms 52
From nginx-plus-ingress 100.00% 183ms 47ms 31ms 161
Note:
A success rate of<nil>means that traffic metrics are still populating. Send additional traffic and wait for success rate to properly appear.
Raw
To view individual traffic metrics, use the kubectl get command shown below.
kubectl get --raw /apis/metrics.smi-spec.io/v1alpha1/namespaces/default/deployments/reviews-v3/edges
The output looks similar to that shown below.
{
"kind": "TrafficMetricsList",
"apiVersion": "metrics.smi-spec.io/v1alpha1",
"metadata": {
"selfLink": "/apis/metrics.smi-spec.io/v1alpha1/namespaces/default/deployments/reviews-v3/edges"
},
"resource": {
"kind": "Deployment",
"namespace": "default",
"name": "reviews-v3"
},
"items": [
{
"kind": "TrafficMetrics",
"apiVersion": "metrics.smi-spec.io/v1alpha1",
"metadata": {
"name": "reviews-v3",
"namespace": "default",
"selfLink": "/apis/metrics.smi-spec.io/v1alpha1/namespaces/default/deployments/reviews-v3/edges",
"creationTimestamp": "2019-10-16T22:33:02Z"
},
"timestamp": "2019-10-16T22:33:02Z",
"window": "30s",
"resource": {
"kind": "Deployment",
"namespace": "default",
"name": "reviews-v3"
},
"edge": {
"direction": "to",
"resource": {
"kind": "Deployment",
"namespace": "default",
"name": "ratings-v1"
}
},
"metrics": [
{
"name": "p99_response_latency",
"unit": "ms",
"value": "2969m"
},
{
"name": "p90_response_latency",
"unit": "ms",
"value": "2700m"
},
{
"name": "p50_response_latency",
"unit": "ms",
"value": "1499m"
},
{
"name": "success_count",
"value": "9"
},
{
"name": "failure_count",
"value": "0"
}
]
},
{
"kind": "TrafficMetrics",
"apiVersion": "metrics.smi-spec.io/v1alpha1",
"metadata": {
"name": "reviews-v3",
"namespace": "default",
"selfLink": "/apis/metrics.smi-spec.io/v1alpha1/namespaces/default/deployments/reviews-v3/edges",
"creationTimestamp": "2019-10-16T22:33:02Z"
},
"timestamp": "2019-10-16T22:33:02Z",
"window": "30s",
"resource": {
"kind": "Deployment",
"namespace": "default",
"name": "reviews-v3"
},
"edge": {
"direction": "from",
"resource": {
"kind": "Deployment",
"namespace": "default",
"name": "productpage-v1"
}
},
"metrics": [
{
"name": "p99_response_latency",
"unit": "ms",
"value": "29600m"
},
{
"name": "p90_response_latency",
"unit": "ms",
"value": "26"
},
{
"name": "p50_response_latency",
"unit": "ms",
"value": "13333m"
},
{
"name": "success_count",
"value": "11"
},
{
"name": "failure_count",
"value": "0"
}
]
}
]
}
Supported Metrics Endpoints
NGINX Service Mesh supports the SMI-spec endpoints shown in the table below.
| Endpoint | Description |
|---|---|
| /apis/metrics.smi-spec.io/v1alpha1/ | gets supported resource kinds. |
| …/namespaces | retrieves generic information for traffic between namespaces. |
| …/namespaces/{namespace} | retrieves generic information for traffic to and from a particular namespace. |
| …/namespaces/{namespace}/edges | retrieves specific information for traffic to and from a particular namespace. |
| …/namespaces/{namespace}/{resourceKind} | retrieves generic information for traffic between resourceKind types. |
| …/namespace/{namespace}/{resourceKind}/{resourceName} | retrieves generic information for traffic between named resource of specified kind. |
| …/namespace/{namespace}/{resourceKind}/{resourceName}/edges | retrieves specific edge information to and from named resource of specified kind. |